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An hour ago, when we were the sport of ferocious nature in the heart of a country infernal, no more than one of us would have swithered to strike a blow at a fellow-creature and to have robbed his corpse of what it might have of food and comfort Now we gloated in the airs benign of Dalness house, very friendly to the world at large, the stuff that tranquil towns are made of.
The land of Lorn was black dark to the very roots of its trees, and the rivers and burns themselves got lost in the thick of it, and went through the night calling from hollow to hollow to hearten each other till the dawn. Dalness lies in Glen Etive, at a gusset of hills on either side of which lie paths known to the drover and the adventurer.
At last M'Iver rapped on the door and demanded attention. "Is there any one there with the English?" he asked. The gentleman of Dalness answered that he could speak English with the best cateran ever came out of MacCailein Mor's country, and he called for instant release, with a menace added that Hell itself could not excel the punishment for us if they were kept much longer under lock and bar.
All the paths about the mansion were strewn with rough sand or gravel from the river, and the rain, in slanting spears, played hiss upon them with a sound I never hear to-day but my mind's again in old Dalness.
There were about a score and a half of the Mac-Donalds altogether, of various ages, some of them old gutchers that had been better advised to be at home snug by the fire in such a night or saying their prayers in preparation for the looming grave, some of them young and strapping, all well enough armed with everything but musketry, and guided to the house by the blind woman's son and a gentleman in a laced coat, whom we took to be the owner of Dalness because two men of the bearing and style of servants were in his train and very pretentious about his safety in the course of a debate that took place a few yards from us as to whether they should demand our surrender or attack and cut us down with-out quarter.
As it happened, she had come back from Dalness some days later than ourselves, none the worse for her experience among the folks of that unchristian neighbourhood, who had failed to comprehend that the crazy tumult of her mind might, like the sea, have calm in its depths, and that she was more than by accident the one who had alarmed us of their approach.
But the years have come and the years have gone, and I am older than I was at twenty-five. The Campbells I can never reach: they walk secure, overseas, through Lorn and Argyle, couching in the tall heather above Etive, tracking the red deer in the Forest of Dalness. Forster is dead. Ewin Mackinnon is dead, I know; for five years ago come Martinmas night I saw his perjured soul on its way to hell.
A sharp blade, certes! he had seen that unless something brought us to pause a while at Dalness we would be out of the reach of his friends before they had gained large enough numbers and made up on him.
"We are but an advanced guard," said he, with a happy thought at lying, "and our friends will be at your back before long." M'Iver laughed pawkily. "Come, come, Dalness," said he, "do you take us for girls?
John Splendid laughed again. Our reverend comrade here, by the wisdom of his books, never questions, it seems, that we have a lease of Dalness house as long as we like to stay in it, its pendicles and pertinents, lofts, crofts, gardens, mills, multures, and sequels, as the lawyers say in their damned sheep-skins, that have been the curse of the Highlands even more than books have been.
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